Ghana – Chapter 14
Accra, August 12, 2005
This
chapter follows closely on the heels of Chapter 13.
This past weekend, I finally got a chance to drive up to Aburi to the botanical
gardens – with someone who knows a mahogany tree from a pineapple. They're in
their 120th year and a little run down, but still interesting. While up in Kumasi
visiting a cocoa farmer training school a few weeks ago I met Claudine Ethier, a
forester from
Quebec. She is now a permanent resident at the nice little Bed and Breakfast
where Ellen, David and I stayed in Kumasi,
The Four Villages Inn. Claudine is running a nursery to grow seedlings of
valuable timber species to help in replanting Ghana's rain forest.
She was on her way back to Canada this weekend and stayed at my place for the
weekend. That was my motivation to go to the botanical garden. What better
guide than a diplomaed forester to guide me (in spite of the quirky Quebecquois
accent in English).
We were guided around Aburi by one of the students there. It is a
post-secondary training program for landscape gardeners. Our guide was named
Napoleon Bonaparte. NO SHIT! (Woops, Mom may read this). That was really his
name! He's in his second year of training. He was real good while he was
reading the signs in front of the plants, but the moment we got him off script,
he fell apart.
There is one section where all the famous visitors (Queen Elizabeth II, Prince of Wales) plant something. Most of those plants looked half dead.
There was another section with spice plants (cinnamon, allspice and camphor). If you crush the leaves, guess what they smell like…
Then there is a medicinal plant section. Unfortunately, the forest is rapidly taking this section over and it was hard to tell which bush or plant each sign referred to. Anyway. They will all make you puke.
This will give you and idea of the size of a tree in the African rain forest
(there are no jungles in Africa - they're all in South America).
Some of you with a green thumb may have grown ficus houseplants - a nice,
climbing vine. Well don't turn your back on your ficus. This is
not a picture of a tree. See the holes in it? It is actually a giant
ficus that grew up and completely swallowed a large tree. It killed the
tree, which eventually rotted out from the inside of the ficus and all
that's left is the ficus. Shades of "Little Shop of Horrors". But don't
worry. I think you can outrun a ficus.
Now, some more economic botany... As I may have mentioned to you in earlier Chapters, I also work with cocoa projects. This is what cocoa looks like when it's growing on a cocoa tree in Africa. That’s a cocoa pod.
You break open the pod when it's ripe (yellow/orange) and it's full of cocoa
beans an inch or so in diameter. The beans are fermented and dried and then
processed to make the chocolate that some weak people love.
What's interesting to me is that the cocoa tree's flowers grow right out of the
main trunk and large branches of the tree, not out of the smaller branches like
on most fruit trees. Here's a picture of the flower and a very young cocoa pod
(about 1 1/2" long).
This one's for Susan...
Remember, I asked you about the yellow flower in my garden that I thought might
be a hibiscus? This is what the one in my front yard looks like (it's a large
climbing vine about 12 feet high). The flowers are 5 or 6 inches across.
Well, it's not hibiscus. I found the answer. I discovered a neat message board
run by the British Columbia Botanical Garden where I posted the photo above and
a description. Within a few hours I had the answer. It's an allamanda
cathartica. The "cathartica" part comes from the fact that almost all parts
of it are poisonous and are used as a cathartic. (See? Everything makes you
puke!)
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*
OK, so most of you are bored out of your gourds now (a little gardener’s joke).
Well,
tough. This is what I do here and I don't have pictures of anything else to
fill this chapter up with so you're out of luck.
In case you guys were wondering what my mother did while she was in Ghana...
She was introduced to the chief and his elders in Cape Coast. He was so
impressed with her that he "enstooled" her. The Ashanti use carved wooden
stools as the symbol of chiefs and "enstooling" is a little like getting crowned
- at least you get your own stool. She was named Nana Lorene Queen Counselor.
She was presented with this ceremonial stool (which is sitting my living room
now until I come home).
As for me, I know you all are still trying to figure out what I really do (or
trying to remember what I look like). Well, there are three of us
RABs in the world (RAB = Regional Alliance Builder). I have colleagues based in Nairobi, Kenya (for East &
Southern Africa) and Kingston, Jamaica (for the Caribbean). We met in
Washington in June for a working session. Here are my two RAB colleagues and
me, hard at work. That's Nancy on the left and Daniel (from Kenya) on the
right. Daniel came up and spent the weekend with us in Rochester while he was
in the USA
with me.
Ciao
and Ko Brah (which translates in Twi as "go come" - which loosely means "bye but
come back soon").
G - 1 G
PS My okra is doing great. I had some this weekend (fried, of course). Something ate the young watermelon plants so we’ll have to try again.
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